by Jim Shepard
THE KIDS ON MY BLOCK REACTED TO MY LACK OF interest with their own. Sometimes they threw stones at me. Another whole summer came and went. I wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle, so I went to a boy who owned one and he said he would teach me. I could get on by myself after the first lesson but then he wouldn’t teach me anymore. I met Lutek one evening when I sat near some kids I didn’t know and they told me to leave but I didn’t. He had a rabbit-skin cap with earflaps and when one of the kids asked where he got it he said that he’d found it between the kid’s mother’s legs, so they started pushing him around. They knocked him into me, so I shoved the kid who’d done it and he landed on his back and head on the paving stones. The other kids chased us and Lutek led me into a cellarway hidden by a coal chute and they all ran by. I asked how he’d found it and he said he’d been hiding since before I was born. While we sat there in the dark I asked him more questions but he stopped answering and just sniffed at the air like a dog.
He was even smaller than me. He was so small he said he had a younger sister who everyone thought was older. He said the village he was from was pitiful. It didn’t appear on maps and it was just three lanes of cottages, fences, and mud. He’d gone to school for a year at one at the Talmud-toyres on Miła Street, which he said was famous for graduating ignoramuses. He said his father was the strongest porter in the city and pulled a handcart he harnessed to himself like a horse. He was especially good with the huge machinery crates from Lódz that three men had trouble budging. Otherwise he sat in a tavern. He worked at the railroad station near Jaruszewski’s courtyard. That neighborhood scared me. Smoke from the slag heaps always darkened the air over the loading docks.
My mother was happy I’d made a friend but soon upset that I was never around to watch my younger brother once Lutek took charge of my education. He showed me how to steal from the vegetable carts, and how one of us by making a commotion could hide what the other was doing, even when the peddlers were watching out for one another. With a French pamphlet he took from a bookstall he proved I didn’t know anything about girls, and discovered I knew so little that I didn’t even know what he was talking about. After he had cursed some filthy Russians he also said I didn’t know anything about politics, which was also true.
He taught me that no one else’s problems should get in the way of our having a good time. I told him about all the trouble I’d gotten into with Yudl, including the broken school windows, but he was unimpressed. His family had moved three times since coming to Warsaw and in one neighborhood he’d been hauled in by the police for breaking down the door of a boy who’d stolen his cap, and in another for having put a hole in a kid’s head with a jeweler’s hammer. He said the kid was okay after a while, though he’d had to wear a head-bandage and everyone had called him the Sheik.
I asked if his father beat him for such offenses and he said he’d had more luck with his father’s strap since he’d learned to rub garlic and onion onto the welts. And that he was lucky that his father was more upset about his sister’s stutter. His father tried to cure it by mimicking her, to shame her into getting over it. She liked me because when I had to wait for her to finish what she was saying I never got impatient. She told Lutek that I was kind and he should bring me around more often, so he had me talk to her while he slipped money from her secret hiding-spot. He said she knew he stole from her but she never complained about it. When he took enough we would buy sausages and ride the trolley.
ON THOSE DAYS I WAS AROUND AND MY YOUNGER brother was feeling better my mother ordered me to take him to the park so he could get some fresh air. He was always thrilled to go. The back courtyard with the garbage bins got no light and was deserted except for the occasional stray cat. Lutek always found us wherever we went. He said that being saddled with a consumptive wasn’t the end of the world and we could always find some uses for him, so one day we persuaded him to steal a jar of jam and on another to sing to a policeman. Or else we went about our business and he followed along. Whenever Lutek saw his blank look he asked him, “So how’s the weather in Wilno?” a joke my younger brother never understood.
On our way home I told him not to tell our mother about whatever we had done, and then she said he had to, and so he did, and I wouldn’t get supper that night. Then after he went to sleep she would sit at the foot of my bed and we’d look at each other. Neither of us would speak until she finally asked me to try to remain a decent human being and then kissed my cheek before wishing me a good night. And I would look up at my ceiling in the darkness and remember that I gave her nothing in return for what she gave me, and almost never had. Then I would plan my next day with Lutek.
SHE GAVE ME A PARTY FOR MY NINTH BIRTHDAY. THE day after the party Lutek’s sister asked how it had been, and he said what was there to tell about it. We had raisin cake and the guests were my younger brother and Lutek. My younger brother gave me a book of his drawings and my mother sewed me a leather satchel.
That whole winter my younger brother’s health improved until it got worse and he had to go to the hospital. Before he got sick my mother had pneumonia and took to her bed for a week, and he spent the whole time on the end of her blanket, staring. When she woke up she would ask me to get him a sweater and I’d ask if he was cold and he would say no. He was starting to cough too, and she finally got out of bed to drape a muffler around his neck. Then after she said she was feeling better he got so excited he ran around the back courtyard in a rainstorm and came in soaked and shaking.
For a while she tried to take care of him herself at home. She had me read to him in the afternoons, and he always chose a book called Jur about two brothers, one sickly and in constant need of looking after and the other a picture of health who ended up dying. My younger brother always liked the end in particular, when the sickly brother stood over the healthy brother’s grave and talked about how much he missed him.
Finally it turned out that he had pneumonia too and had to go to the hospital. By then he had to be carried through the streets in an ambulance.
My mother and I sat with him when we could. My older brothers and father visited once, all together. They brought him a big tin of sweets that they opened and sampled.
He hated being left at the hospital at night and screamed at our leaving. My mother always wept all the way home. After three days his fever was so high he didn’t recognize us. The nurses brought him compresses but he was so hot they couldn’t keep them cold. They brought him bread soaked in milk and we helped him open his mouth to eat it.
The day he died I told him that he was acting like an older boy, being brave. My mother had brought him home and he said he wished he could buy me the tailor shop’s miniature uniform of the Uhlans Regiment, which was my favorite. My mother was at the pharmacy and he asked when she was coming back. He said she’d been telling him how much better he was getting, but that now she sounded less sure. He breathed like someone was sitting on his chest, and it was hard for him to say even that much.
When my mother returned she found him out of bed and standing in his nightshirt on a chair to look out his window. She warmed his feet and got him back into bed and told him that if he looked outside when he woke, then all of his dreams would escape. She sent me to the kitchen to make him some tea and asked if I thought I could do that much. While I was filling the kettle I could see them both. She took his hands and called for him to look at her. She said she wanted to tell him a story, that it was going to be a long story, and he needed to stay awake for it. He seemed to come out of a daze and smiled at her. The story was about a poor Jew and a sultan. She said about one of the sultan’s decisions, “Isn’t that amazing?” and while she was asking him, he died.
SHE STAYED IN BED FOR TWO WEEKS. I DID WHAT housework I could. My father and brothers ate at taverns. I made my own dinners. Lutek stayed away. Once the sun had set my mother took to talking to me in the dark. She wouldn’t let me light any lamps until my father and brothers came home. After my brothers went to sleep, my father woul
d sit up at the kitchen table with vodka and weep without making any noise.
She said she forgave me. She said none of us had done all we could for my younger brother. She said she still remembered when she’d been a little girl and a teacher had said, “I predict that someday you are really going to amount to something.” She said this teacher had told her favorite students, “Well, you’re sitting on the wagon. Let’s see how far you can travel down the road.” She said this teacher had awarded her with a book inscribed For your good conduct and many talents.
She said she’d lost all of her energy for work, but that maybe it would return in time. She said her feelings were like a coin in a strongbox and that from now on maybe I alone would have the key. She said she knew that my father was spending what little money they had saved. Let him take it and choke on it, she said. Maybe then he’d leave her in peace.
She said that when she was ten she’d had to care for her infant sister, who screamed when she was wet, screamed when she was hungry, and screamed when she was poorly diapered. She said she used to run all over the house holding her sister, not knowing what her sister wanted from her. She said she’d lived for the day when her mother would come home and take her sister back, and everyone would be happy with the good work she had done.
When it got warmer, she started cooking again and doing a little cleaning. She went outside. My tenth birthday came and went without raisin cake. One morning when I thanked her for my breakfast she said that the older she got, the more of an infant she became. I asked if she was feeling better and if she wanted to walk in the park when I got home from school, and she said that yes, she did. She said that sometimes it felt as if everything had been taken from her, and that all she wanted was to take something back.
THE NEXT MORNING MY FATHER TOLD ME TO GET up because it was war and the Germans had invaded. I didn’t believe him, so he pointed at the neighbors’ apartment and said, “Come to the radio, you’ll hear it.”
People had spent the day before taping up windows and running through the streets buying up food. In the morning our teacher told us that as of the next day our school, which had had an anti-aircraft battery moved onto its roof, was under military control, that we should leave our registration books to be signed, and that he would see us after the war. We wanted to go to the roof to view the anti-aircraft guns but a soldier wouldn’t let us on the staircase.
When I got home, my father and older brothers were taping our windows and one of my brothers showed me a blue glass filter that would fit over our flashlight.
That afternoon we saw an airplane with smoke coming out of its tail and two others chasing after it. Another plane flew over very low and a soldier took his rifle and started shooting at it until people on the street screamed that he was endangering everyone, so he stopped.
There were air raid sirens at night but for a few weeks nothing happened. Lutek would tell me the next day how much he liked the sirens because everyone had to get out of bed whatever time it was and the kids in his building would meet in the basement and play. He said all of the kids in his building liked the air raids except one whose mother was crazy and caused a lot of trouble by running out into the street and uncovering the windows while the sirens were still going.
For a few days in the afternoons we went to our neighbors’ apartment to hear the news. It was all bad.
The bombardment of the city lasted all day and night without stopping and went on into the next day and night. We stayed in the cellar and the wailing and crying and praying drowned out the explosions if they were far away. My mother sat against the wall with her arms around me and whenever I stood to stretch my legs she asked where I was going. My father and brothers sat against the opposite wall. After three days things quieted and someone came down the stairs and shouted that Warsaw had surrendered. My mother told us not to leave but my brothers and I climbed out into the street.
Dust and soot hung in the air. There were giant craters in the intersection. The big tree on the corner had flown all apart. Our back courtyard was covered with broken glass. Down Gęsia Street something was still burning.
My mother led us back up to our apartment, which only had some broken windows. She sent us out to look for planks to board them up, so I walked over to Lutek’s neighborhood. He threw his arm around me and grinned and said, “Well, we survived the war.” I told him what we were looking for and he led me to an alley fence that was blown apart. Together we brought home so many planks that my father told my mother to leave me alone whenever I wanted to go out during the day. We especially needed water since nothing came out of our faucets, and Lutek showed me how to steal from his building’s cistern.
We gathered anything we might need. Sometimes we were chased off but not often. The destroyed buildings were a great playground and we always found something surprising in the rubble. One building’s entire front had been sheared away and we could see into every apartment up to the roof, and near the top a family was still living there. They looked like a store display. One leg of an iron bedstead hung out into space. In the attic, sparrows flew in and out of the holes made by the artillery shells.
On the way home with my water I was stopped by a bald-headed man in a filthy green surgical apron who was carrying a little boy. The man had eyeglasses covered in dust and a yellowish goatee. “Where’s the shoe store that was here?” he asked.
“There,” I told him, and pointed.
He looked at the smashed walls that had fallen in on one another. “I just found him in the street,” he said. The boy looked asleep. “He can’t walk on all this glass without shoes. I have to carry him until I find something for his feet.”
I recognized his voice and said, “You’re the Old Doctor from the radio.”
“Would you have shoes at your house that might fit him?” he said. But then someone else called, “Pan Doctor! Pan Doctor!” and he turned and carried the boy off in that direction.
WHEN THE GERMANS MARCHED IN, THE CROWDS were so quiet I could hear a fly that was bothering a woman a few feet away. Lutek said there was more noise at the parade on his street and that some people waved little flags with swastikas on them. At the market square the next day no vegetable stalls were set up and instead more Germans unloaded crates from trucks. One talked to me in Polish. “Bring us something to drink,” he told me, and then he and his friends straddled the crates and waited.
Later that week they set up a soup kitchen and handed out free bread. The soldiers seemed to never be sure where they wanted everyone to line up. They enjoyed herding people from place to place. A little girl with big ears waited three hours in line with us and when she got her soup she handed it to Lutek and said she wasn’t hungry. After she left he told me she was a neighbor and that her parents and sister had been buried in their building during the bombardment. He said that when you saw the building you knew they wouldn’t be dug out until Christmas.
That night two Germans showed up at our door looking for furniture. They roamed around our apartment before deciding we had nothing they liked. They went next door to our neighbors with the radio and took two chairs and a soup tureen. The husband told us after they left that they’d pulled him around by the nose with pliers because he hadn’t said a courteous enough hello.
The next day the Polish police had taken over the soup kitchen and the soldiers were gone. Then the day after that the Polish police were gone and so was the soup kitchen.
THAT WINTER WE DID ALL OF OUR SCROUNGING IN heavy rain. Streets were like marshes because of the big dirty puddles between the cobblestones. We had to be careful because everything was extra slippery. It didn’t help that in January Jews could no longer be on the streets after nine and before five. Lutek’s father sometimes had to leave his crate where it was and get it in the morning. Most were so heavy that no one could steal them anyway. He told us about one of the other porters who claimed that because he was so ugly the Germans constantly interrupted his work to take pictures of him.
All Jews had to wear yellow armbands. Lutek said that the extra layer would help keep us warm.
There was always a new rule. My mother was upset about the one that made Jews show a delousing certificate to ride the trolleys. Then she was upset that we could no longer ride certain trolleys. Then she was upset that we had to declare our possessions and said it would be the first step in stripping us of everything we had. My father reminded her that the Germans had already been in our apartment and had found nothing worth taking.
Lutek and I rode whatever trolleys we wanted because he taught me how to wear a half-sleeve over a long-sleeved shirt so we could roll it down to cover our armbands. And he showed me how you had to jump off if the trolley drivers slowed in a certain way because it meant that Germans were waiting at the next stop. Once we jumped off right into some German police but they only took us by the collars and told us to help a doctor who was being made to empty all of the silver from his sideboard into some waiting cars. The doctor kept asking us to be careful with everything. After the last load he asked a German if he could keep his grandmother’s saltcellar, a little boat he showed us because it had great sentimental value for him, and the German said no.
“Who leaves so many things lying around?” my mother asked at dinner about the loot I brought home, and my father said what did she know about it, that she should be quiet and count her blessings.
“It’s a blessing he’s safe and I want to keep him that way,” she told him.
“Does he look like he’d do anything dangerous?” he said.